Her eyes scan the room. Book spines glimmer; the wood blushes. The air is spiced with the smell of old paper, a cross of grass and vanilla. Daniel might have a reader’s slouch and moley eyes and a frumpy suit that can’t hide the pooch of his belly, but nonetheless she feels comforted beside him. Nearby, Hemingway is curled up in a horseshoe shape, one ear perked, but his eyes closed, snoring softly. The place is the same, the hour is the same, the arrangement of books and the skull on the desk is the same—but right now the danger feels very far away and the bookstore sheltered and cozy once more. Her family is safe. Sarin and Juniper have agreed to help them. And she appears to be closing in on answers. There are a thousand reasons she should lock herself in a closet and wait for dawn, but for the moment, in her mind, she’s winning.
“Who buys from you, Daniel?”
He looks up from the book and readjusts the glasses sliding down his nose and says, “Oh, I generally deal with three different types of customers. Those who walk in and buy on a whim. Those who are decorators looking for something old to class up a living room, and they’re the absolute worst, I must say. And then there are the studious, serious buyers. They’re not collectors so much as they are antiquarian scholars. They come from all over. China, Germany, Brazil, England, New York, and right here in Portland.”
But in the case of every buyer, Daniel says, they decide to bring a book home because, whether they understand it or not, these titles hold stores of power between their covers. That’s what he believes. He really does. Books are like batteries, he says. And you grow a little stronger by reading them, surrounding yourself with them.
“Such is the case with this title,” he says, and closes it and pats the cover fondly. The leather appears branded more than stamped with the title and author, Lock and Key by Joseph Hilfin. “It doesn’t look like much at first. I would classify it as in very good condition, given its age of some two hundred years, with the rubbing and chipping and staining along the cover, the minor tears and cracks in the pages.” He runs a finger along the spine and says the hinges are tight with no separation from the binding. He describes foxing—the acidification of paper dating back to the nineteenth century that results in rust-like spotting—and the laid-in pages that are loose, complementary to the central text but not directly part of it, typically a map or ancillary material.
“This is interesting, isn’t it?” He flips to the front matter and shows off the torn bookplate there. Only half of it remains—discolored and faded—but she can make out enough. The border is a seething tangle of serpents fanging each other. And the name of the owner, in red script, is cut off. “Crowley” is all it says, a name she recognizes somehow. From her earlier conversation with Josh on the phone. “Crowley.” She says it aloud as if that will help spur the memory.
“Indeed,” Daniel says. “And though I can’t prove it as such, I find it very likely it belonged to none other than one Aleister Crowley, who during his time owned one of the world’s largest collections of occult writings. As an interesting side note, a man named Jimmy Page later purchased Crowley’s home and library and presently owns an occult bookshop in London.”
“Think I’ve heard of him,” Lela says absently, and pulls her notebook from her purse.
“Mr. Page? He belonged to a rock-and-roll band named Led Zeppelin that was apparently quite popular in the 1970s.”
“Thanks, Daniel. I got it. Okay—Crowley, Crowley, Crowley.” She flips through the notebook’s pages until she finds what she’s looking for. Crowley, the self-proclaimed wickedest man in the world. A practitioner of black magick, Tantra, Satanism. Samuel Fromm, the man who built the Rue, was a known associate of his. “What else can you tell me about him?”
Daniel says, “Crowley was interested in creating what is called a moonchild. A scarlet child. A child seeded and possessed by an ethereal being. A fetal avatar that would carry a superbeing into our world. Demonized. Possessed. This is accomplished by a series of magical and sexual rituals that call forth darkness. Oh, and another side note. The moonchild was the subject and title of a novel Crowley wrote in which a group of magicians attempts to impregnate a girl whose offspring will change the course of human history. Anyhow, I sold a pristine copy of it not long ago, and the buyer told me an anecdote about L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, and Jack Parsons, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Apparently they were in touch with Crowley and attempting black magick rituals in order to birth their own moonchild, what they hoped would be the Antichrist.”
“What does this have to do with the skull?”
It sits in the center of the desk, facing them, watching them, and they are both lost for a moment in its gaze. Ciphers etch every inch of it. The warped, elongated shape makes it appear like some shadow of a man bent by the low angle of the sun.
Daniel clears his throat and turns the book’s thick pages. They don’t flip crisply but roll like fabric. She can’t read any of it—the text is in Latin—but she recognizes some of the drawings and feels repulsed by some of the illustrations, a man with a snake growing out of his groin, a woman with the head of a goat. A black beetle scuttles out of a fold and scurries across the desk and vanishes beneath the skull, and Daniel pauses only to say, “Oh my,” before continuing.
“Have you ever had a key made?” he says. “Have you ever seen a locksmith work on a car or a front door and try to get the cut exactly right? The teeth must be just so. Just so. Or the grooves won’t line up with the pins in the tumbler lock.
“This book is a kind of study guide in supernatural locksmithing. It teaches you how to open different kinds of doors for different kinds of darkness. Some allow people to go there, and others allow demons to come here. There are outright summons. Impregnations akin to the moonchild ceremonies. Solstice performances meant to channel power through sacrificial appeasement. And on and on. There are many different locks, many different keys. And these ciphers,” he says, “the ciphers on the page and the ciphers on the skull are like the cut of a key.”
“A key to what?”
He points a finger at the barbed heading at the top of a page. “A black site. Also known as a dusk or night chapel. A place of worship. Where unholiness gathers. And—with some encouragement—bleeds into this world.” He stares at her for a long few seconds and then shows off his pipe-yellowed teeth in a grin. “It’s rather splendid to think about, isn’t it? Especially at this haunted time of year?”
“The Rue.” She remembers what Hannah saw when they crossed the Burnside Bridge. A pillar of darkness rising out of the Pearl District. “The Rue is the black site.”
“In this case I prefer the term ‘night chapel.’ Here’s why: the skull.” Lela told him there were five graves, arranged in a kind of circle, at the construction site. “This,” he says, “seems to indicate the pentagram, a holy number and sigil to any dark parishioner. Some see it as a representation of the five wounds of Jesus Christ or the binding of the five elements. Or infinity.”
She holds up her right hand, remembering the bloodied handprint that was Tusk’s signature. “Five fingers.”
“What’s that?” Daniel says, and she doesn’t answer, lost in thought. “Regardless, if the skull was one of five, then it seems to me it was ritualized and must be some kind of relic.” He talks about how, over five hundred years ago, St. Peter’s Basilica was built in the Vatican. There are marble towers staggered throughout the interior that were constructed to entomb the skull of a saint, the lance that pierced Jesus’s side, and the cloth that cleaned his dead face. The Vatican did this because it understood the importance of relics. Go into any European church and you’ll find more of the same—relics—typically constructed into the altar. A piece of an exhumed saint’s body, maybe a hand or an ear, or a splash of a saint’s blood. Sometimes priests will even wear the relics, such as a finger bone braided into a necklace or hat. “This isn’t unique to Christianity. Just as hell isn’t limited to Christianity. Virtually ever
y religion has some iteration of the same thing, as though trying to get at the same truth that escapes them all. Relics are understood to channel and harness power. For good. And for evil.” Daniel removes a handkerchief from his pocket, and though the store is cool, he wipes the sweat beading on his forehead.
She picks up the skull and holds it before her face. She can’t fight the feeling that it’s going to open its jaws and bite her. She remembers the story Josh told her over the phone, the one about the Shadow People that haunted the Northwest before the local tribes banded together to extinguish them and reclaim their territory. This skull was one of the husks they left behind.
“If they were exhuming the skeletons,” Daniel says, “then I think it’s fair to say they wanted to use them.”
“For what?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you before. In the book here, Lock and Key. The designs on this skull match the designs in this chapter.”
“What’s the chapter called?”
“The layman’s translation?” He tips his head and his glasses catch the orange light of the lamp. “Gates of Hell.”
❖
The sky is a predawn pink. Lela does not walk directly to The Weary Traveler, but zigzags her way through downtown, checking over her shoulder every block, hurrying past alleyways.
She finds the rear entrance to The Weary Traveler unlocked. Inside several men busy themselves in the kitchen and dining room, helping themselves to whatever is in the fridge and cupboards. One is drinking directly from a milk jug, and another is trying to clean up the spilled grounds and murky puddles surrounding the coffeemaker. A few sit at the tables, pouring cereal, spreading jelly on toast, arguing over the crossword puzzle in the paper. The counter is a mess of bran flakes and broken eggs. Something on the burner smokes.
“What are you doing?” She yanks the pan of blackened bacon and snaps off the heating element.
“Making breakfast of course,” says the man with the milk jug. He’s older, lean, and tan with a dent in his forehead. He wears a white undershirt, fleece pants. His feet are bare and veined and slap the floor when he walks toward her. “Care for a glass?” He holds out the jug. “It’s whole. The way milk ought to be.”
“Where’s Mike Juniper?” she says.
“Who’s that again?” he says.
“Juniper. He runs the shelter.”
The old man knits his eyebrows together, and then his face softens as the question escapes him. He seems to see her for the first time and once more holds out the jug. “Care for a glass? It’s whole. The way milk ought to be.”
She pushes past him and scoops a few spilled coffee beans off the counter and pops them into her mouth and chews them down for the bitter punch. She starts down the hallway. She can hear the television blaring in the lounge, and on the couch she finds a man in a hoodie, clicking through the channels. When she asks him if he’s seen Juniper, he shrugs and returns his attention to the screen.
She heads to the entryway next and immediately notices the tablet hanging beside the door. It streams with what looks like a red rain, some ever-expanding code. Her brain is foggy from a severe lack of sleep and caffeine, but this is enough to jack her attention. Everything in the shelter is controlled by a central interface—that’s what Juniper told her—the locks, alarm system, climate control.
Now her hair prickles and her flesh tightens, her senses going from bleary to acute. There is something tannic in the air. And though the light is dim, it is enough for her to see. Lela drops to her knees with a choked cry. She puts her hands to her mouth.
Above the reception desk hangs her sister, Cheryl, in a state of crucifixion, her head lolled to one side and her hands and feet nailed to the cross. Blue light surrounds her and blood mucks the wall below her. It spills to the floor and runs below the desk and floods forward like the entryway’s red runner.
And finger-painted on either side of the crucifix, in big oozy letters, reads the following message: WE HAVE THE GIRL. BRING US THE RELIC.
Lela does not know about the worm that took hold of her sister last night, that still possesses the shelter, nor does she realize that Cheston has escaped from below or that Juniper lies upstairs on a blood-soaked mattress, his breath as shallow as his pulse. These discoveries will come later. For now she rushes through the building, calling out, “Hannah! Hannah!” to empty room after empty room, knowing her niece is gone but needing to confirm for herself the terrible knowledge that she has failed her family, that this is all her fault.
Chapter 19
THIS MIGHT BE the third time Juniper has come back from the dead, but he’s hardly used to it. His mattress is soaked with blood. His body has holes ripped in it. He keeps trying to open his eyes, even as sleep grabs him, drags him down into its brain-crushing depths. Tired isn’t the right word. Spent, emptied, husked, they’re not adequate either. Grave. That’s how he feels. Very grave indeed.
Something rouses him. A voice calling his name. He only wants to sleep, but his eyes creak open and through the scrim of his eyelashes he sees her. Her face hanging over his. Sarin. Her face creased with age and worry. A gray light filters through the blinds. The clock on the wall ticks its way toward 8 a.m. When he says her name, his voice comes out a croak that gives way to a cough. His chest rattles and he hacks something up that he promptly swallows down. All of this happens in the space of a few seconds, but miles and hours might as well separate them, since he feels as though he is living in some muted, slowed-down version of the world.
“You’re going to be okay,” Sarin says. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
Juniper doesn’t believe her. Stab wounds aren’t something she can simply rip out of him. His eyelids want to close, and he can’t fight them any longer—and when he opens them again, the clock has swirled its way to nearly noon. At first he believes he is in a hospital and then realizes Sarin has transformed his bedroom into a kind of triage unit. All the lights are on, the room painfully lit with ghost-white fluorescence. And blood bags dangle over him like a bunch of balloons, their lines siphoning into his neck and elbows and thighs. He feels a tingly honeyish warm—from the blood rush or from some morphine prick.
He tries to sit up, and cannot, a half dozen different parts of him threatening to tear. His vision goes momentarily pointillist with the pain, as if trillions of atoms separate by an inch before crashing back together. He fumbles the lip of the sheet back to reveal the iodine smears and black stitches that make the puffy, red wounds look like eyes closed in suffering.
Sarin comes in through the door to stand beside his bed. “Everyone thought you were ugly before. Look at you now.”
Even smiling hurts. “I’m Frankenstein’s creature.”
He wants to ask who did this, what happened, but his mind remains muddied up with the nightmare he just woke from. When Juniper died the first time, everyone wanted to know where he went, what he saw. He saw something then. An ocean of light. This time he saw its opposite. It came to him more vividly than any dream. The only word that feels right is prophecy. He experienced Portland as it would be.
Buildings burned and smoke dirtied the air. From different corners of the city came gunshots and screams and broken glass. A bus sped along and crashed through—one after the other—the cars abandoned in the streets, until one of its tires blew and it listed into the corner of an office building that cleaved the grille like a hatchet. In this apartment a wife knifed the cock off her husband, and the husband sheared the nose and nipples off her, and in this condo a boy jammed a pair of scissors through the neck of his father, and in this office the boss pulled the registered .357 from his safe and one by one executed the men in suits who hid beneath the desks in their darkened offices. A pregnant woman hung from a telephone pole, her skin purpled and swollen. Bodies hung everywhere—from balconies, from trees, from street signs—like the ornaments of some terrible holiday. And bodies lay everywhere, on the sidewalks and in streets and parks, more of them every minute as they fa
ll from sniper fire or plummet from open windows, their arms and legs and necks twisted at unnatural angles, like the broken dolls of an angry child. Dogs and cats and crows and even a drift of long-snouted hogs fed on them. A gas line erupted and buckled the pavement, and from below came gouts of fire that made the air ripple.
And in the center of the city, in the Pearl District, where the Rue once stood, there rose a black tower. It pulsed and twisted, like a hungry root that reached thousands of feet and flowered in the sky, spreading into a pewter-colored lightning-lit mass of clouds a hundred miles wide. Every now and then something would crawl from it or fly from it or unpeel from it or ooze from it—and take to the city, looking for something to hunt down, play with, rape, tease, feast on.
This—Juniper knows, though he wishes he didn’t—this is what was coming. This is what they were fighting. This is what he tells Sarin when she sits at the edge of his bed and touches her hand to his cheek. The woman—the reporter, Lela—enters the room with her arms crossed and her dog panting at her side. His words are clumsy and slow from the morphine. His eyes keep wandering from her face to the Halloween decoration he taped last week to his window, a grinning devil. His tongue feels as dry as skin and his words come out in a garble, but Sarin nods in understanding.
“We’re not going to let that happen,” Sarin says.
Lela doesn’t strike him as the crying type, but she’s crying now. Her cheeks are streaked and her face blushed. At first he’s brain-addled enough to believe she feels for him, and he almost tells her, “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” Then he realizes something. The absence of something. The missing among them. Lela’s sister. And her niece. Cheryl and Hannah. They were here last night. They were here when this happened.
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